March 20, 2004
Presentations
While preparing to deliver training at the BBC last week, I was confronted with the far-too-frequent problem of what package to use and how to store the content.
I want to store all content in XML (aside from binary images, movies, sounds, obviously), and to transform them into whatever presentation package I want to use - be it an in-house solution, or one of the major desktop packages. The benefits of using XML are clear - it can be put under revision control, multiple different format output can be created from it (HTML, PDF, etc), and more than one person can edit it at once using SubEthaEdit. We can also keep content separate from presentation methods.
It transpires that Keynote uses an XML file format to store content, which is good news. OpenOffice.org has made information on their XML file format available for a long time. So that just leaves Microsoft Powerpoint for Mac and PC. Finding details on the file format used is difficult. The glossy MSDN office web site has no useful information. In the end, the mighty Google helped me out: this Microsoft Knowledge Base Article tells me all I need to know:
Microsoft does not provide technical support, or any other type of support for the Microsoft PowerPoint binary file format
That seems pretty straightforward to me. I think it's finally time to give up trying to work with Microsoft products.
Posted by savs at March 20, 2004 2:03 PM